Word: noirish
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...Zyzzyx Road has been sold internationally, playing more expansive dates in Australia, Spain and 21 other countries, earning nearly $400,000. The film, which aspires to a noirish road picture in the vein of Red Rock West or U-Turn, isn't truly a historic stinker - it's super-low box office has just given it a bad rap. It hasn't been picked up by a U.S. distributor for a wider release in the states, but there has been interest from DVD companies and others who want to capitalize on the weird press...
...crime and the fact that it remains unsolved account for part of its persistent hold on our collective memory. But it has-or can be made to have-a heavy symbolic resonance as well. Post-World War II Los Angeles had about it a dark glamour. People were reading noirish novels (and seeing the movies based upon them) that had been created just prior to and during the war. The city was still digesting a huge and largely ill-favored population increase-people had flooded in to take jobs in booming wartime industry. It was policed by a force infinitely...
...Anthony Mann's feature-film career falls into three main phases: noirish melodramas in the '40s, westerns in the '50s, epics in the '60s. Nothing unusual here, since these were the dominant genres of their decades, and nearly every director of middling or higher status was obliged to try his hand at them. But Mann did more than crank out the sausage on order. He turned it into sirloin...
...John C. Higgins wrote or co-wrote the five noirish procedurals - Railroaded!, T-Men, Raw Deal, He Walked by Night and Border Incident - that lifted Mann from the bondage of B-minus musicals, got him hired by a major studio (the major, MGM) and form the bedrock of his current furtive eminence. Higgins had written several Crime Does Not Pay docudrama shorts for MGM in the '30s. And when the police-procedural docudrama became a popular feature-length genre in 1945 with the success of The House on 92nd Street (produced by Louis de Rochemont, who had fashioned miniature versions...
...Mann and Alton would soon cease their partnership. And the director would move on to the wide open spaces of the western and the epic. But his characters would remain as gnarled, and noirish, as ever...